II
James
“BEHEADED”
Heat haze on the runway tarmac, petrol-blue C&A windcheater, sunglasses against the Jerusalem white light. Inside the terminal, blocking a long corridor between the gate and Immigration, a pair of officials ask for his papers. Just Cassius Gallio, not anyone else off the flight from Munich. The other passengers flow on past.
Terrorist prevention officers, one man, one woman. Security has tightened globally since the fire in Rome. They examine the name on his passport, check the photo against his face.
‘Sunglasses. Take them off.’
His naked face against the photo. They get a good look at Gallio’s blue eyes. Yes, he thinks, take your time. You know who I am, the idiot who let a corpse escape, but much older and with a face creased like a veteran. Of something, of everything.
‘Business?’
Gallio puts his glasses back on. ‘Holiday.’
They laugh. ‘Love to see that particular brochure.’
So they know he’s here. Cassius Marcellus Gallio has landed in Jerusalem. All these years later and he’s back, following orders, no idea what the Complex Casework Unit want from him. Presumably the Israelis are equally bemused, which explains their charade with the passport. They’re watching. Everyone is watching. Now they know he knows they know.
The officials hand back Cassius Gallio’s passport and wave him through.
Arrivals. He checks the limo name-cards, but no one has been sent to meet him. A local driver holds up a sign for Mr. Williams, and Gallio could borrow Mr. Williams’s car as far as the old city centre. We all look alike to them, he thinks, pale-haired, blue-eyed, and in his case the cold-hearted north. However hard he has tried to assimilate.
Don’t do anything foolish. Gallio tells himself he’s been out of action a long time, and he’s nervous. He’s not the man he was, and should proceed with caution. As instructed, he buys a magazine—Time in English—Valeria’s sense of irony. Then he follows the everyman signs for a disgraced Speculator without a waiting limo to Exit, to Taxis.
Cassius Gallio wades through the Israel heat, but the first cabbie won’t take him, not at lunchtime: he has tomatoes and a flatbread on paper across his thighs. All Gallio needs to know. Next in line is a dented Mazda seven-seater and from the middle seat, through the Perspex screen, Gallio studies the driver’s right ear. He makes an effort to imagine this man and his ear in the time of Jesus. Israel may have been brighter then, more optimistic, with a freshness to the lie of life after death. He can’t remember, or needs more time to decide.
The driver’s right ear has blackheads and a single unplucked hair.
‘The Old City. In your own time.’
The driver activates the meter and the radio, rap music in Hebrew. He likes the song and turns it up, then heaves the Mazda in front of a delivery truck and swears forcefully, even though everyone in Jerusalem should now be good. That’s what Jesus was supposedly for.
The meet is the Birman restaurant on Dorot Rishonim. Valeria’s choice, and Gallio had checked out the place as best he could without resources, on TripAdvisor. Great food but terrible service, which didn’t surprise him. Secret police love a place with terrible service. No eavesdroppers, and the staff barely notice the customers.
He wonders at the secrecy, and realizes that if he disappears no one will know.
On Jaffa Street Gallio taps his rolled-up Time against the screen. He pays, asks for a receipt, and steps out onto a relaid pavement. Car bomb, he thinks, sign of the times. The leaves are back on the trees so the blast happened at least a year ago, but in Jerusalem past and present coexist. Possibly the future too. Cassius reminds himself he doesn’t know everything, so be careful, be so very careful.
He stands still for at least a minute, a rube, a tourist. He takes off his jacket and looks for heads in parked cars, for patterns in the traffic, for pedestrians who never quite manage to move along. He folds the jacket into his suitcase.
Nothing suspicious, or that he wouldn’t expect to see. His wheeled suitcase is loud and innocent on the relaid pavement behind him, handle in one hand, rolled-up magazine swinging in the other. From half a block away he sees Valeria sitting at an outside table.
For years, ever since the tribunal went against him, Gallio has caught glimpses of women who remind him of Valeria. Valeria turns out not to be one of those women. Since the time of their youth her face has grown angular, stronger than he remembers. She is fuller in the waist, and with her sunglasses and sleeveless top she could pass, like Gallio, for a city-break believer.
He drops the Time magazine on an empty table, the signal to abort, and walks straight past.
Cassius Gallio can’t arrive in Jerusalem and make the CCU his first point of contact—he has made a vow to be a better man than he was. The magazine stunt buys him perhaps an hour, while Valeria secures the B meet.
Within ten minutes Gallio is at the International School, and the gates are open: home time. Through the arched gateway he can see children of all colours running and shouting. One of these is his, and he ought to feel an emotion beyond the worry that his daughter won’t be there, or that he won’t recognize her. Then he sees her, he immediately knows which one she is, her movements less supple than the others. She’s chasing a boy but one of her legs doesn’t straighten. Sadness rises in him, to his throat.
He steps back, an outsider with his suitcase on wheels, a foreign salesman in windcheater and sunglasses, a lost obvious bomber. Fuck. He shouldn’t draw attention to himself, or no more than he can help.
Alma has a caliper on one leg, a school rucksack over her shoulder. She’s making her lopsided way to the gate, and Gallio imagines Judith will be picking her up. He panics. He retreats into a shop and watches from the shadow of an awning, half hidden by a stack of orange-crates. In her International School sweatshirt Alma looks like the others but the hitch in her step makes her somehow tough, unstoppable. Gallio might be wrong. He’s her dad but knows nothing about her. He looks for Judith. Doesn’t know much about his wife, either, not any more.
He’s trying to force himself into making a decision, some definitive move either forward or back, when Alma looks straight at him. He’s convinced she sees the half of him that’s visible, though she won’t recognize him, not after so long. He steps out from behind the crates, but then a silver Range Rover pulls up between them, the only car that dares park directly in front of the school gates. A man comes round from the driver’s side and offers Alma his hand. She ignores his help and climbs in the back. The man picking her up is Baruch.
‘Who was following you? We checked. There was nobody there. We made sure. Nothing.’
They’re at the B meet—Gallio remembers the procedure—a Lebanese place in the Old City’s Armenian quarter. Valeria is inside, at the back with an unobstructed view of the doorway, and Gallio sits beside her on a bench against the whitewashed wall. No eye contact. They watch the door instead, ready for surprises.
‘Why all the secrecy?’
‘We don’t know who’s watching.’
‘Neither do I,’ Gallio says, ‘apart from your lot and the cops at the airport. Didn’t like the look of the other place. Can’t be too careful.’
Cassius Gallio had prepared for this meeting, had visualized it incessantly since her orders had found him in Germany. But now they’re sitting beside each other he leaves his sunglasses on. From Valeria he gets: authority, curiosity, no perfume. A streak of silver in her hair.
She gets: he doesn’t know what she gets, and wishes he didn’t care.
A yellow drape over the entrance shifts in the late afternoon breeze, and at the other occupied table off-duty recruits rate the local women. They go through a range of criteria, count on their fingers, burst out laughing.
‘You went to your daughter’s school. That wasn’t the plan.’
Of course she knew. Cassius Gallio is the junior now, the exile who should expect to be monitored.
‘
I haven’t agreed to any plan.’
Gallio remembers this place, and the only change is a TV in a corner, halfway up the wall. The TV is off, or broken. He wants a beer, an Amstel, and probably a chaser if Valeria can claim expenses. His hands feel unsteady. He puts them under the table and orders a mineral water, gas. The bubbles may convince him there’s more to the drink than the water.
‘You look older,’ she says. Her blonde eyes, turned on him for the first time, have a hard edge. A hard centre too. He wonders why she’s putting on a stern face, auditioning for the role of an older woman. Then he realizes she is an older woman. She doesn’t need to audition, because ageing has chosen them both.
‘Thanks. Moldova, Germany. The ranks.’
‘Must have made a big mistake.’
Cassius Gallio leans forward over his water, weight on his elbows, aware of Valeria at his shoulder. He does a thing he does. He taps the pad of each finger precisely against its opposite, pad after pad in sequence, thumb through to pinkie and back, proving his brain has absolute control over his ageing and sober body. He goes through the sequence several times. Finger to finger, back again. Never misses. ‘So the judges of the tribunal decided. In their wisdom.’
They pinned him on two indictments: misplacing the corpse of an executed criminal and failing to protect a key witness, even from himself. They recorded Judas as a suicide, and Gallio didn’t cover himself in glory by suggesting an alternative: the disciples had murdered Judas to avenge his betrayal of Jesus. Either way, the death of Judas was Cassius Gallio’s fault, but he’d been confident of support from Valeria. As a Speculator, even a junior one, she should have insisted on approaching the evidence objectively. Judas was a civic hero who’d outwitted a leading terrorist. He had plenty of money, nothing to fear from the authorities, and he didn’t leave a note.
The tribunal duly asked Valeria for her thoughts, and also a character reference for Gallio. She surrendered her notebook, empty apart from random geometric shapes which were of no help to him at all. As for his character she declined to comment, given their personal history.
Now, so many years later, Valeria is not Cassius Gallio’s enemy. He won’t have enemies, not at his age. She’s a former colleague he knows not to trust. She sent him an El Al ticket, economy class from Munich, and he used it because he misses the man he was. He imagines she needs him. Her need makes her vulnerable.
Gallio takes off his sunglasses, some kind of defeat, and rubs at the side of his eye with a thumb.
‘Why am I here?’
‘I looked you up. The Jerusalem militia recently captured two of the original Jesus followers, which surprised us. We didn’t think the disciples would dare come back, but these ones were found in the Lower City. We had the situation under control, and for a while the Israelis kept the two men safe in a lockup.’
‘Don’t tell me. The disciples of Jesus escaped. They were rescued by angels, and have a story to prove it.’
‘You can help us.’
On the day Cassius Gallio had seen the body of Judas split apart, he’d texted Valeria. Later that evening, before they came to arrest him, he’d left a second message pleading with her to intercede on his behalf. He loved her, he said, and regretted not expressing himself earlier and more clearly. She understood the intricacies of Jerusalem, and should tell the tribunal that Judas wasn’t the problem; Jesus was the mystery they needed to solve. When they found the body none of the other unknowns would seem so daunting.
Gallio sent the same message twice, to be sure it arrived and because he hadn’t known who else to ask. He felt outmaneuvered by the Jesus faction, by Jesus as a personal opponent, so he’d persuaded himself he was special to Valeria beyond the call of duty. Between them they’d see that justice was done.
She hadn’t replied, and after a year or two Gallio stopped feeling bitter. Valeria was an ambitious professional who valued her career. For her disloyalty, along with his shattered life, he shifted the blame onto Jesus.
Cassius Gallio applies pressure to the twitch near his eye. He is gentle with himself, pushes in with his thumb and then the heel of his hand. The nerve stops fluttering, it starts again. He gives it a tap. A harder double-tap.
‘Cassius?’
‘Here.’
‘You know these people. You were closer to them than anyone else. We have a job for you.’
‘You got married.’
‘That’s not why I called you in.’
‘Someone important. Rome, obviously, for the right calibre of husband. Now you’re the woman in charge.’
‘You’re well informed, but out of date. I’m divorced. I run the Complex Casework Unit, Middle East region. It’s not the biggest job out there.’
‘Nor the smallest.’
‘We’re reopening the Jesus case.’
Cassius Gallio fiddles with his sunglasses, uses a stem to spread ice melt into curves on the table. ‘Hence the secrecy.’ He makes alphabet shapes no one can read, not even himself. ‘A bit embarrassing, investigating a dead man.’
‘We don’t know who was responsible for the fire in Rome. It was big. Thousands dead, damage still being repaired, and the CCU are ruling nothing out, not even provincial cults with a grievance. The Jesus belief is growing, even as far as Rome. We killed their leader.’
Valeria puts her hand on his, and Gallio doesn’t know if she’s forgiving him or asking for forgiveness. The case should never have been closed, not with so many questions left unanswered. Cassius Gallio had been right, but being right was overrated. Being smart was safer.
Gallio registers the veins in Valeria’s hands, and a grey liver spot. The years they’ve spent ignoring Jesus have aged them both, but she should have backed him at the time. He won’t repeat his mistake, trusting her, projecting a life they never had, and he checks his heart and is glad he feels nothing. Or very little. He is immune to her so he pulls his hand away, makes the first misjudgement of his comeback.
‘Why now? Why me?’
‘We want you to identify a body.’
In camps and barracks beyond the soft reach of civilization, sweating or freezing, Cassius Gallio had tried to forget. The Jesus case was unlike any other he had handled. As was the Lazarus case, only weeks before it, but after the tribunal he had no incentive to unravel these enigmas.
Jesus stopped being his problem, and Gallio busied himself with the tedious life of common soldiering. Across the Empire, moving with his legion, he helped persuade the benighted and barbarian of the need for elected assemblies and stable leadership.
He tried not to feel nostalgic for a genuine interest in what he was doing. He followed orders, and acted as if the civilizing process was the inevitable end of history. The world could not go backward, not now. Those who swore by their gods would be persuaded that an imaginary friend was a less reliable leadership option than an educated governing class. A celestial city should not shine more brightly than a city built with planning controls over centuries. There was an order to the universe, and the first would be first. To suggest otherwise was to encourage false hopes, because observably the last will not be first. Not all of them. On the borders of civilization, wherever Gallio’s legion was posted next, the last were poor and malnourished and oppressed. They were firmly last, and none of the local superstitions had ever changed that fact.
Yet still at night he lay awake, letting the darkness do its worst. How had the disciples vanished the body of Jesus? From Tripoli to Colchis he collected variations on a theme—mineshafts, quicklime, the furnace. None of the tested methods for disappearing a body applied to Jerusalem, not in this particular case. Gallio had investigated every possibility, and kept returning to a story his stepfather used to tell from the birth of civilization, or soon after.
Romulus, the founder of Rome, enters an underground room in the Forum. He is old, his pulse weak, his service to the city complete. His senators in their purple-striped togas follow him into the room, which has no windows and only one door. Wha
t follows is a classic sealed room mystery: Romulus is never seen again.
He vanishes.
‘So then.’ His stepfather liked to unstrap his sword and rest it across the arm of his chair. ‘Tell me what happened. Work out the crime, and how they made him disappear.’
In popular legend Romulus had rejoined the gods. A story spread that instead of dying Romulus had ascended to heaven, which explained his missing body. This was not the answer Cassius Gallio’s stepfather wanted. When Gallio first suggested the ascension of Romulus as a solution, his stepfather had unsheathed his sword and whacked him across the thighs.
Eventually Gallio’s stepfather spelled out the lesson he wanted the boy to learn: a rational explanation is available. Romulus was murdered by the senators. Of course he was. Always suspect those closest to the victim.
The senators had closed the door and stabbed old Romulus in silence, alerting none of the Forum’s hyper-alert slaves. Then they knelt to dissect the body. Each senator concealed a small section of flesh or bone beneath his toga, and they carried Romulus away from the sealed room in pieces. The cuts of meat they dispersed through the city, flushed into cisterns or tossed to scavenging dogs. No trace of Romulus was ever found.
True story.
‘We thought the Israelis were going to finish off the cult on our behalf. They made a decent start.’
Valeria walks quickly, wearing trainers with her skirt and sleeveless top, a tourist like any other. She has her familiar fast stride, and Cassius Gallio admires the vigour that comes from a lifetime of civil service health insurance and not making mistakes.
She stops and points out a street where the locals stoned a Jesus follower to death, a short while after Gallio’s disgrace. An Israeli agent called Saul set up the hit to showcase his talents, but the street has reverted to what it was and always will be: shopfronts filled with toiletries and battery-powered fans. Gallio checks they’re not being followed. Jerusalem puts him on edge.
Acts of the Assassins Page 4